“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.”

[Anonymous Bosch]

Farmers on the Brink:

“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

It was a spooky time to be out at sea off the US East Coast on Halloween in 1991. A strong storm system over the maritime provinces in Canada merged with the remnants of Hurricane Grace, forming a new, epic, and dangerous Nor’easter. The winds of this new storm breached 70 miles per hour and a wave as high as 100 feet was measured off the coast of Nova Scotia, but the storm was not renamed as either a tropical storm or a hurricane – instead, it is known only colloquially as simply the Perfect Storm. Six fishermen from Massachusetts perished when their vessel Andrea Gail sunk in open waters, and the story of the storm and of that tragedy became the subject of a best-selling book and a blockbuster feature film.

While the concept of a perfect storm is often too casually assigned in popular culture, it is difficult to find a more apt description of what has been unfolding in the global agriculture markets over these past several months. The tempest caused by the European energy disaster has merged with the hurricane of consequences flowing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, forming the genesis of a generational crisis in food that will leave few unaffected. While we’ve been warning about just such a scenario for some time, after spending the past two weeks traveling across the US Midwest and conferring with our contacts in the agricultural sector, even we are a little spooked by what we’ve learned. In a financial crash, the correlation between all asset classes converges to one. The coming crash in global food supply will be driven by a similar phenomenon across virtually every input into farming – they are all spiking to historic highs simultaneously, supply availability is diminishing across the spectrum, and the time to reverse the worst of the upcoming consequences is rapidly running short.

Other than that, things are great.

[malchior]

I can't wait for this conversation with my wife.

Me: We need to build extensive stocks of food quickly.

Wife: Why?

Me: A guy on the Internet named doomberg is predicting global famine.

Wife: Who is he?

Me: I don't know but he has lots of financial market graphs and wrote lots of words.

Wife: Do they make sense?

Me: It reads a lot like a QAnon / ZeroHedge piece...so on second thought.

[Isgrimnur]

[Jaymann]

Never underestimate the plowing proficiency of the pencil.

[noxiousdog]

Coincidently, one of the smartest guys I follow thinks there are certainly factors that could cause some hard time in this area.

The global supply chain is demonstrably fragile.
You're seeing increased isolationism.
Global warming is increasing.
The commodities market is screwy.

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. After business excesses, a war, and a pandemic we had a world wide recession coupled with food scarcity. I don't think it's going out on a limb that when you put those factors back into the pot, what comes out may look similar.

I suspect we'll see high food prices, but I wouldn't go so far as famine.

[LawBeefaroni]

I'm stopping short of MREs but I do have a lot of dry and canned goods in storage. Of course I always like to have a reserve.

[malchior]

Are there general challenges ahead? I can buy that. Do I buy a bunch of anecdotes strung together implies farmers are on "on the brink" and global famine is coming? Nope. It's pure nonsense.

I suspect we'll see high food prices, but I wouldn't go so far as famine.

Yeah this is practically a given at the moment. We're seeing more disruptions.

[LordMortis]

I picked a rotten time to start eating my backlog of food without replacing it. Grocery shopping is already getting expensive but I can still make it to Costco for a $5 chicken and a hot dog and Pepsi for $1.50 for now. Milk OTOH is over $3 a gallon. Eggs are up to $1.50 a dozen. None of this considers the fact that grain prices are already up and word on the CNBC is input costs are too high for US farmers to increase domestic outputs. Fertilizer, in specific, is too expensive to risk farming more.

From where I sit, many a food item is up between 50% and 100% or portions are getting much smaller, supply chain scarcity is a thing, and the sale shopping I used to do obsessively isn't very meaningful anymore. I don't see the end in sight. I assume it's going to get worse before it gets better.

It's a good thing I rarely eat out.

[Blackhawk]

*Doesn't recognize the site*
*Checks the rest of the articles to see if they're reliable*
*Backs slowly away*

Presenting insane, delusional bullshit as meaningful fact is how we got to where we are today.

[Blackhawk]

For the topic at large, the way we like to eat is out of touch to begin with. We're not looking at starvation, we're looking at not living inside a deep-fried, pre-packaged smorgasbord anymore.

Not getting your microwave Eazy-Vittles (each meal of which contains a whole day's calories) as cheap results in a change of habits, not famine.

[hitbyambulance]

what if i just responded with this

https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Wor ... cute-hunge

[Holman]

For the topic at large, the way we like to eat is out of touch to begin with. We're not looking at starvation, we're looking at not living inside a deep-fried, pre-packaged smorgasbord anymore.

Not getting your microwave Eazy-Vittles (each meal of which contains a whole day's calories) as cheap results in a change of habits, not famine.

We also eat waaaay too much meat, and globally about a third of food is grown just to fatten the animals we'll eventually slaughter for Big Macs and chicken nuggets.

[$iljanus]

I think in many developed countries you’re not going to see famine but with prices on the rise due to factors mentioned above, if your country doesn’t have a good social safety net you’re gonna see a lot of food insecurity.

If however you live in a poor country where food access was tenuous to begin with due to economic conditions, poor infrastructure, war, weather, all of the above, it’s going to be a humanitarian disaster.

[Drazzil]

Nope. I don't buy it. I'm a pessimist by nature but it's basically arguing that because we lack certain components to fertilizer we are in trouble or in for a famine. Wrong. All these components can be synthesized using human and animal waste, as a matter of fact waste material is better then making it from oil or natural gas, or potash.

[Drazzil]

Oh and fuck Round up directly. all the pests and weeds are smart to it now, have been for decades, and the response was simply to dump more round up into the soil. We're at the end of that for sure, but we've also had better methods of farming for three decades, just hasen't been cost effective, cause Round Up.

[Drazzil]

hehe, Some benefit of going to an agricultural university after all!

[Jeff V]

I do have a lot canned goods in storage. Of course I always like to have a reserve.

That's my philosophy too

Spoiler:

when it comes to beer.